Please help me spread information on good literature. In other words: please consider sharing a post that you like. Thank you!

Sunday, 13 January 2013

Book Review: Matters of Honor by Louis Begley

For me buying books is a complex process that
always requires my full attention. I let guide myself by intuition, feelings
and reason at somewhat equal parts. So on a different day, in a different mood
and under different circumstances I wouldn’t even have considered the purchase
of Louis Begley’s Matters of Honor,
but as luck would have it, I needed a present for a friend. It was so urgent
that I was determined not to leave the shop without a book, even if I couldn’t
find anything meeting my usual literary standards. Of course, I had to
speed-read the novel before giving it to my friend.

The cover text of Matters of Honor had led me to believe that it was just another one
of those boring stories about college life in the USA, moreover in Harvard in
the beginning of the 1950s. In a nutshell: I thought that it would
be a light read for young adults about to leave home. What attracted my interest,
though, was the fact that one of the protagonists was a Polish-Jewish survivor
of World War II. This was a background that promised to give the novel a little
more depth. And indeed, it was much better than I had expected. I learnt a lot about the USA in the 1950s, the characters of the story are well developed and the plot is convincing. All in all, I had a really good time reading this book.

Most of the story is set in Harvard,
but it’s less about college life than it is about the search of identity and life-long
friendship. The three protagonists first meet when they move into the same
suite of the college dormitory. Sam Standish – the narrator – is the son of an
old New England family who hasn’t yet come to terms with the rather recent
discovery that he had been adopted as a baby by his parents who belong to an
impoverished branch of the Standishes and who are so miserable about it that
they took to drinking. As time progresses he becomes a renowned writer. Archibald
P. Palmer, short Archie, is from a Texan army family that never stayed in
the same place for long. From the beginning he is the socialite of the friends,
someone who enjoys taking risks and hard drinks. The third of the party is
Henry White, born Henryk Weiss, a Polish Jew from Krakow who survived the war by
hiding and who came to the USA with both his parents in 1947. He strives for
acceptance and tries to shake off his Jewish heritage. Anti-Semitism is strong in
the USA at the time. Eventually Henry becomes a lawyer in the Paris subsidiary of a big
New Yorker law firm... Discover the rest for yourself!